that’s a damn shame,” Teri said. “You’ll be missed,” she added, trying to think of other ways to rub it in. But he refused to give her that satisfaction. Without another word, he hung up.
Teri shrugged her shoulders and looked at the telephone, talking to it as if it had a brain. “He could have at least wished me a Happy New Year.” She chuckled.
With a loud sigh, Teri whirled around in the soft leather chair that had begun to feel like it was glued to her butt. She wasted no time getting up, turning out the lights in her office, and calling it a day.
CHAPTER 5
Teri didn’t know that it had started to rain until she drove out of the enclosed garage beneath the building she lived in. But minutes after she’d pulled out onto the street, it stopped. She was glad she didn’t have to haul an umbrella around with her, too. She felt like she was dragging enough already. But it had been a productive year for her, and she had to admit that ending it at one of the most anticipated parties of the year, an invitation-only party at that, suited her just fine. She had already begun to perk up.
It had been a while since she had attended a party. And even longer since she’d attended one on her own. Well, she was not exactly going to the party alone. The engraved invitation that she had received by messenger a week ago had indicated that she could bring a guest. Other than her secretary, Nicole—or executive assistant as Nicole liked to be called (as the metal nameplate on her desk said)—she couldn’t think of anybody else whom she could tolerate socially to invite to another one of these music people parties.
Teri picked up Nicole about twenty minutes past eleven o’clock. When Teri saw Nicole exit her apartment building dressed in black from head to toe, she did a double take. The black turban wasn’t so bad. But the black woolen poncho, the black leather pants, and black boots were a little too much. Teri had on a simple green silk dress, matching green earrings shaped like four-leaf clovers, and a pair of low-heeled black pumps. A pale beige shawl lay across her shoulders.
“You spent hours on end trying to decide what to wear and that’s the best you could come up with?” Teri teased as Nicole climbed into the front passenger seat of her BMW. Nobody would have guessed that Teri was Nicole’s boss. The truth of the matter was, they’d been best friends for more than twenty years.
“What’s wrong with what I have on? A lot of people wear black all the time,” Nicole protested.
“Yeah, and that’s fine if your name is Johnny Cash. But we are going to a party, not a wake. Black is too depressing for a party.”
“But it goes with everything,” Nicole whined as she brushed lint off the front of her poncho.
“So does white.”
“Well, all my bedsheets were dirty.” Nicole gave Teri a playful tap alongside her head and laughed. “Let’s roll. I hope you didn’t forget to bring that contract to give to Rahim,” Nicole said, looking at Teri’s small black suede purse on the armrest.
“I didn’t. If I didn’t want to get this damn thing signed so badly, I’d be on my sofa with a glass of wine and a bowl of popcorn.”
“Well, I’m glad you decided to come out tonight, Grandma. I know I sure needed to get out tonight. Even if it is just with you…”
“Well, you don’t need to pout about it,” Teri said, glancing at Nicole. “You didn’t have to break your date with what’s his name. I didn’t beg you to come with me tonight.”
“It’s not that,” Nicole admitted.
“Oh. I forgot Greg was coming by to pick up Chris. Was he in a good mood?”
“Yes, if you can call acting like a rabid rottweiler being in a good mood. I tell you, Teri, men are such chameleons. Don’t you wish we had other options?”
“We do. But licking another woman’s pussy doesn’t quite appeal to me,” Teri said with a shiver.
It was a smooth twenty-five minute ride. The streets were wet and slick so Teri had to drive carefully and more slowly than she normally did when tooling around L.A.
She kept her eyes on the road and bobbed her head along with the music on a jazz radio station she had discovered by mistake one night.
Nicole was tired. It was hard for her to keep her eyes open. Dealing with her ex-husband had worn her out. But she was not about to let that stop her from enjoying herself tonight. She leaned back, glad that she had a turban on her head. It hid her hair, which was in desperate need of a touch-up and some tightening up assistance.
Teri’s silver BMW, a year old but still exuding that new car smell, moved through an intersection in the direction of an exclusive neighborhood near the Hollywood Hills. One that also happened to be predominantly white. Nicole could always tell a white neighborhood from a black or Hispanic neighborhood. White neighborhoods had yogurt shops and delicatessens and quaint little churches all over the place. The black and Hispanic neighborhoods had their share of churches, too, for all the good it did them. But the liquor stores, the overextended funeral parlors, and the pawn shops ruled the minority neighborhoods. Nicole glanced from one side of the street to the other, admiring the expensive homes.
“Now this is what I call my kind of neighborhood,” Nicole said in an eager tone of voice and a look of envy and awe on her face as she scanned the neighborhood.
“I am definitely hearing that, girl,” Teri agreed with a vigorous nod. “I wouldn’t mind living in this zip code myself.”
“Well, you’re a lot closer to it than I am,” Nicole reminded with a loud, exaggerated sigh. There was a bail bondsman’s office on the ground floor of her building with a steady stream of losers in and out every day. There was a garishly decorated Korean nail shop, the same one that Kim Loo was working in when she stole Greg from her, on one side of her building. There was an open-all-night, dollar-a-load Laundromat on the other. It also served as a makeshift motel for some of the homeless people who patrolled the block. A deserted school bus with no wheels squatted near the corner of a vacant lot across the street. Homeless people avoided the bus because it wasn’t as clean and warm as the Laundromat.
“Being close to it and being in it are two different things. But socially, these folks have their own ’hood problems. Did you see that derelict stretched out on the ground a couple of blocks back? Or those well-dressed white kids huddled in a corner in front of that office building sharing a joint?” Teri asked.
“No, I didn’t. I was too busy admiring all these gorgeous homes,” Nicole replied, still looking out the window with the wide-eyed awe of a child. “So what’s your point?”
“My point is, this is still a small world. No matter where we live, or who we are, we’ve all got some of the same problems on some level.”
The party was in full swing by the time Teri and Nicole arrived at the rapper’s house. Handsome young black and Hispanic valets were parking cars and greeting guests. They all wore stiff red jackets and sharply creased black pants. Fake smiles were plastered on their faces. They knew that the friendlier they were, or appeared to be, the bigger the tip. The scene outside was a media frenzy with ambitious reporters hopping around like rabbits and rude paparazzi waving cameras like weapons.
The only things missing from this frantic scene were a red carpet and Joan Rivers. Nicole took all this in with a
